Results of the Revolution
ИТОГИ РЕВОЛЮЦИИ
Date: 1917
Source: PSS vol 33
Translated by: AI (Claude)

On the question that interests us about the state, Marx sums up the results of the revolution of 1848-1851 in the following reasoning from the work "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte":

"... But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still on its journey through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851" (the day of Louis Bonaparte's coup d'état) "it had completed half of its preparatory work; now it is completing the other half. First it perfected parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has achieved this, it perfects executive power, reduces it to its purest expression, isolates it, opposes it to itself as the sole object, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it" (our emphasis). "And when the revolution has completed this second half of its preliminary work, then Europe will leap from its seat and jubilantly exclaim: Well grubbed, old mole!

This executive power, with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its complex and artificial state machinery, with this army of officials half a million strong alongside an army of another half million, this terrible parasitic organism, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores, arose in the epoch of absolute monarchy, with the decline of feudalism, a decline which this organism helped to accelerate." The first French revolution developed centralization, "but at the same time it widened the scope, the attributes and the number of helpers of governmental power. Napoleon perfected this state machine." The legitimate monarchy and the July monarchy "added nothing new except a greater division of labor... Finally, the parliamentary republic found itself compelled in its struggle against the revolution to strengthen, together with repressive measures, the means and centralization of governmental power. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it" (our emphasis). "The parties which, alternately contending for domination, regarded the seizure of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor" ("The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," pp. 98-99, 4th edition, Hamburg, 1907).

In this remarkable reasoning, Marxism makes an enormous step forward compared to the "Communist Manifesto." There the question of the state is still posed extremely abstractly, in the most general concepts and expressions. Here the question is posed concretely, and the conclusion is drawn extremely precisely, definitely, practically tangibly: all previous revolutions perfected the state machine, but it must be smashed, broken.

This conclusion is the main, fundamental thing in the Marxist teaching on the state. And it is precisely this fundamental thing that is not only completely forgotten by the dominant official Social-Democratic parties, but also directly distorted (as we shall see below) by the most prominent theorist of the Second International, K. Kautsky.

In the "Communist Manifesto" the general results of history are summed up, forcing us to see in the state an organ of class domination and leading to the necessary...